1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a spatiotemporal locator processing method and apparatus which display an arbitrary spatiotemporal region shape in image data in a 3D space with X, Y, and time axes and manipulate the displayed shape in the 3D space, thereby inputting and correcting a spatiotemporal locator.
2. Description of the Related Art
Along with the recent rapid progress in image processing technology, videos (moving images) and still images are generally processed as digital data. With this digitalization, techniques of efficiently compressing image data having large data amounts have been established. In addition, development of network technologies such as the Internet and satellite broadcasting/CATV allows processing of a large quantity of image data. An image database or video-on-demand system in which image data are stored in advance, and extracted and used as needed is being put into practical use. Automatic monitoring system from a remote site is also becoming major. As described above, in using images, there are requirements to recognize an object in an image, conversely, to search for and extract an image containing a desired object, or classify images.
To meet these requirements, the present assignee has already proposed a method of efficiently describing an arbitrary spatiotemporal locator over a plurality of frames in a video (e.g., U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/612,497 or 09/633,231).
When an operator designates a spatiotemporal region of one frame, spatiotemporal regions of the remaining frames are automatically extracted. If the operator wants to correct the designated spatiotemporal region or automatically extracted spatiotemporal region, numerical value information (e.g., XML data) that indicates this region must be changed for each frame. The numerical value must be changed in consideration of the shapes of spatiotemporal regions in preceding and succeeding frames or in all frames. Hence, correction is very difficult.